


Anamnesis

by thedevilchicken



Category: Oblivion (2013)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 23:47:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10707684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: The more time passes since the Tet went down, the more Jack remembers.





	Anamnesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Babie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Babie/gifts).



The more time passes since the Tet went down, the more Jack remembers. 

He remembers his life after the mission, of course. He remembers the house in the sky floating over the mountain range, snow in the winter that filled up the air but never seemed to settle and how Vika would never go outside in it, even when he did, even when the tests he ran said it was totally safe, just in case. He remembers how the sun felt on his skin through the glass in the morning, how the breeze felt in his hair when he opened up the doors and stepped outside, remembers the clear blue skies and the storms at night that lit up everything for miles in brilliant flashes. 

He remembers how he woke up at the same time every single day even when the alarm wasn't set because the job they did was just enough like duty that it made sense to him to be there, on Earth, following orders, even after everybody else had fled to Titan. He did his job, because his job needed doing. He fixed drones, because they needed fixing. He dreamed strange dreams at night that couldn't have been memories and told himself maybe it just mean he'd spent too long down there, even if he couldn't imagine what it'd be like to leave. And then one day he met himself out in the desert and everything he'd thought he'd known seemed to get ragged round the edges. 

Trekking through the desert, once the other him had stolen his ship, he wondered if maybe the things he'd dreamed had all been real somehow - _she_ was there, after all, the woman from his dreams, and it turned out she was real. Of course, he was almost at the edge of heat stroke and he had a bad case of dehydration to match, so he figured maybe everything he'd seen was one huge hallucination because honestly, that made more sense than getting his ass handed to him by a guy who looked just like him except for the blue 49 where he wore his yellow 52. But then the Tet blew and he couldn't've imagined that. The Tet blew and the Scavs swept to his rescue and it was like his engines stalled and he spiralled into freefall. The Scavs weren't aliens. The Scavs were human. Everything was lies.

He threw up when they gave him water, and it wasn't just because he'd had nothing to drink in two days then chugged a whole pint down at once. Kara gave him another cup and told him to _sip it this time, don't you know anything?_ And then she and Sykes talked between themselves like he wasn't even in the room, about what they were going to do with him, about what they _could_ do with him, what the others would want, what would be for the best. They couldn't agree. Turned out the Scavs were really human but what he fixed on right then was those two, arguing about whether or not he was anything like the other him had been, if he was going to be their enemy like all the rest had been before number 49 or if maybe they could trust him. Kara argued they should give him a chance. Sykes argued they couldn't afford to. Jack honestly sure which of them was right, but he sure as hell hadn't gotten saved from the desert to die in a cell.

"I'm an engineer," Jack remembers saying, interrupting the argument with a splutter over his half-empty cup of water. He cleared his throat. They both turned to look at him. "I bet you have equipment that needs maintenance, right?" The pointed way Kara looked at Sykes said he was right on the money. "Look, put me to work. Either I'll prove I'm useful or you'll shoot me. What exactly do you have to lose?"

Kara put her hands on her hips and after a moment's heated argument, Sykes grudgingly agreed. They took their decision away to the guy in charge and the next day, Jack started work. 

That first day, that whole first week, Sykes was never far away. He was always watching, with the heel of his hand on the grip of his gun.

\---

It was a month before they let him work on anything more critical than a toaster oven, and even then he was under guard the whole time. It seemed like the guards worked on some kind of rotation but even so sometimes that guard was Sykes, though Jack knew the guy had bigger things to worry about than whether or not the guy they'd scraped out of the sand that day was going to be able to fix the grill. The Scavs, the survivors, whatever they were going to call themselves now there was no one left to give them stupid names, they'd elected a new leader and Sykes was the guy's second in command, his right hand man, supervised their off-base operations, helped out with weapons training just in case they came across something nasty out there 'cause it turned out there were sometimes other people with interesting notions about property, sometimes animals that'd managed to survive and not as pets. Turned out Earth was pretty hostile, even without the Tet making it that way. 

Sykes watched him while he worked. Sykes watched him while he ate. Sykes watched him, period, until one day Jack walked right over to him at dinner, in the mess hall or whatever they'd found to call it that didn't make it sound like they were living in a military base though Jack guessed they really were, and he sat down opposite him. Sykes watched him then, too. He watched him like he was making a thorough threat assessment. Jack knew; he'd made enough of them himself over the years, or at least the Jack who'd made those memories had.

"Y'know, you can't watch me forever," Jack said, over his tray, poking at his wilted vegetables with a fork. "You're either going to have to trust me or shoot me and get it over with."

"Maybe we should've just left you in the desert," Sykes replied, looking at him levelly across the table, holding his fork like he was ready to stab him in the neck given the right provocation. 

"If you're going to keep looking at me like that, honestly I wish you had." 

Somehow, that was the moment Sykes started to trust him; Jack figures he must've sounded like he meant it, which was good because he did. Six weeks, eight weeks, he started to see him hovering less and less while he worked, though sometimes he'd look up and find him watching from a catwalk while he was wrists-deep in the insides of a jeep with oil smeared up his arms right to his elbows, while he was tweaking the battery pack in an energy rifle with a screwdriver under a magnifying lens, while he was helping out with maintenance on the water recycling units that they really couldn't live without. Jack started giving him a dumbass mock salute, sarcastic at first but then somehow it turned close to playful. Somewhere along the line, Sykes started trying to hide a smile as he turned and walked away. Somewhere along the line, Sykes's hand stopped twitching toward his sidearm every time the two of them crossed paths.

And at night, when Jack dreamed, he started to remember more and more. 

Sometimes, back when they were all still living down there in the bunker, Sykes would come over to Jack's table at dinner or Jack would go to Sykes's. They were both the kind of guys back then that people left alone, though he guessed that was for different reasons - some of the older ones still didn't trust Jack then, and frankly some still don't trust him now, and Sykes, well, they all knew Sykes was their weapons expert and he'd killed more people with his rifle from behind a scope, with a handgun, with his hands, than the rest of them had combined. Jack figured they thought maybe Sykes liked it, but Jack understood the situation a whole lot better than that: Sykes was a military man. Sykes did what he did to protect them all. There was no _like_ about it.

Sometimes they ate together; for the first few weeks, that was all they did, sitting across the table from each other in stony silence, glancing up every now and then over hydroponically-grown vegetable stew or vegetable chili or vegetable pie because meat was pretty scarce and sometimes Kara joined them and did enough talking for both of them as well as herself - it was a relief when she did, Jack thought. Then sometimes, after the first few weeks, Jack and Sykes actually started to. Sykes could be pretty terse but sometimes he told Jack things about life on the base and the things he'd seen outside of it, about dodging drones and fighting back other survivor groups who wanted the things they had. He talked about Beech and the things he'd done to make life better. He talked about Beech's successor the same way and Jack knew he didn't have to ask why Sykes had never wanted the top spot himself. For a jerk like Sykes sometimes is, Jack thinks he's pretty self-aware; he's just too hot-tempered for that kind of leadership.

When Sykes drank, he talked more. Jack rotated through mandatory combat training sometime not long after week twelve and afterwards, after he'd matched Sykes shot for shot and blow for blow all day every day for the first four days, stubborn about it, almost belligerent, after training was over for the day, Sykes dragged him aside. Jack went with him. It turned out while Kara was away scavenging because the dumbass name had had to come from somewhere, Sykes had no one he could trust after training, and they headed into his room, just as small and stark and empty as the one they'd given Jack to use. They dabbed antiseptic on each other's bloody knuckles and bandaged up each other's hands in silence, and afterwards, Sykes brought out two glasses and a bottle of what turned out to be basically moonshine though it tasted a whole lot like oil stripper.

He told Jack about Julia, what Beech and 49 had done, that they had no idea where she was but he assumed she was still alive somewhere. He told him he and Kara really were just good friends and that was all there was to it, for various reason. He told him there was nothing they could do for Vika in the house up on the mountain because there were no was no way they could get to her. Jack told him he understood; they'd've had to've dragged her out kicking and screaming anyway. She'd've never believed what they knew about the Tet. She'd've died first. Perhaps she was already dead. The only reason he'd ever thought about life on Titan was because she'd wanted it.

It went on for weeks, even after Jack rotated out of combat and back to maintenance. He taped Sykes's hands and they drank together, at opposite sides of a crappy metal table that would've looked more at home in interrogation than someone's quarters but that was just the way things were down there. Sometimes, Jack told him what he'd dreamed and Sykes tried to assess whether what he dreamed sounded anything close to true or not. He told him he remembered Mission Control before the Odyssey launch, Sally wishing them luck over the radio, how it was his third time going up out of the atmosphere attached to a rocket so he tried to act like he wasn't nervous at all but that was pretty much bullshit, and Sykes knew enough to call him on it. He told him he remembered Julia at the Empire State Building, remembered whole baseball games from when he was still just a kid, remembered the Academy and his graduation and Sykes said that all sounded pretty reasonable to him, it sounded like it could've happened just the way he dreamed it. Jack guessed it probably had, not that it had happened to _him_.

He said he remembered his first girlfriend and how dumb he'd looked in his tux at his senior prom and how the first time he fell in love, it was with a first lieutenant called Jake who'd died in combat. Sykes looked at him over the table, frowned at him over the table, lifted his drink and said, "Yeah, I believe that." 

"You do?" Jack replied. 

Sykes nodded faintly, and he sighed as he looked away. 

"Yeah, I do," he replied, and Jack watched him drink, how his throat worked as he swallowed, how he rubbed the back of his neck under the ends of his hair, how he rubbed his face, his beard, ran his hand over his throat. There was a story there that he wasn't telling. When Sykes looked at him again, the _way_ Sykes looked at him, dark and hot and like he understood, Jack wasn't sure if it was the story he wanted or the man that it belonged to. 

Back in his own room later that night, on his bunk with the lights turned out, with his hands on his skin under the worn, scratchy sheets, he figured maybe it was both.

Three days later, Sykes came in from a scavenging run with a truckload of canned goods twenty years out of date that the cooks said would pretty much all still be fine; they ate stewed beef and canned peas from their metal trays at dinner and afterwards there was a bottle of really good Russian vodka that they started at the table in Sykes's room.

"You always keep the good stuff for yourself?" Jack asked, raising his glass.

Sykes did something pretty close to smiling as he raised his glass almost like a toast. Jack understood; Sykes hadn't taken the vodka for himself, he'd taken it for Jack. The next time he talked to Kara, it was like a punch to the gut: they knew what he liked from Jack 49.

Four days after that, Sykes came in from a scavenging run with something better than a truck of canned goods. They dragged it into an empty hangar and when Jack walked in, Sykes was waiting to show him; maybe it'd seen better days, maybe it wouldn't fly right away, but the bubble ship was almost all there. It wasn't his, it was Tech 49's, it was missing its cockpit window and its engine was pretty screwed, and maybe no one else even believed it'd ever be fixed except for him, but he thanked Sykes anyway. He figured it could make it his, even if everyone else already kind of thought it was.

"I thought it might be useful," Sykes said, like _useful_ was the reason he'd done it, like it wasn't some kind of a gift. Jack didn't call him on it. He figured things were simpler that way.

\---

Work on the ship was pretty consuming. They still had the regular maintenance schedule to keep up, all the guns and the water recyclers, the vehicles that kept crapping out from the sand - he and Mike and Annie and Juan were electricians and mechanics and plumbers and who the hell knew what else. They still had all the usual work so Jack went into the hangar after dinner and tinkered then, hung up lights he traded off-the-books work for, stripped the engine down and built it back up from scratch, put in parts that he got Pavel and Tricia from the workshop to put together, put in parts that Sykes brought back from his trips. Sometimes, Annie and Juan and Mike all helped. Mostly, it was Jack.

Some nights, he slept in the damn hangar. Some nights, Sykes came in with a bottle and they sat down on the raggedy bedroll Jack had put out on the floor, leaned back against the wall and passed Sykes's shitty moonshine between the two of them. Six months since the Tet by then. They sat too close, but Jack tried not to let it bother him. He tried real hard not to remember a Navy first lieutenant called Jake. He tried real hard not to think about Sykes the same way. The way they looked at each other sometimes, it was harder than it should've been.

Eight months, Jack started up the ship. The engines kicked into life just the way they'd always used to. The tail rotor spun up. Maybe the cockpit was never going to be fit for space but it was fine for surface work and three days later, the whole thing fully tested, stable, Jack was cleared to take her out; Kara went with him, hanging on for dear life but grinning like a fool as he pulled higher, as he pushed down lower, as he made sure everything was right. When they got back down an hour later, there were just a couple of final tweaks. When he got back into the hangar in the morning, Annie and Juan and Mike had stripped off the 49 from the tail and stencilled on _CMDR J Harper_ instead.

"Hey, don't look at us!" Annie told him, grinning, holding up her greasy hands in front of her coverall. "That was Sykes's idea. If you don't like it, go bitch at him."

When he asked Sykes, he just shrugged; Jack tried not to wonder about it, what the change meant, who the hell Sykes really thought he was, though he guessed he'd confused the hell of out himself so who knew what he'd done to everyone else. Then two days later, Jack was back in the air teaching Kara to fly.

They weren't meant to go far, just like the scavengers on the ground weren't, except with the ship they could go a whole lot farther in the same short span of time. Jack worked a couple of days in the maintenance bay then a couple in the ship, one then the other, Kara in the co-pilot's seat. They didn't go far for the first couple of weeks, just in case the engines failed and they got stuck out of comms range, but nothing went wrong. They got the go-ahead to run farther out, hauling crap back with them in the bay where he'd always kept his bike before and 49 probably had, too. They found boxes of clothes, parts they might be able to use, a whole crate of hand sanitizer that the germophobes in the kitchens went crazy over. He brought back a couple of books that he read in his room after Sykes left, like that would take his mind off of him. It didn't.

Then, he got the okay to push farther. He got the okay to go back to the house. Kara was about to hop into the co-pilot's seat just like always, but Sykes put his hand on her arm; she nodded; Sykes swung himself in instead. It was the first time he'd shown any interest in going up but honestly, Jack had a feeling it had less to do with the view and more to do with the destination.

He expected to find Vika dead. He landed on the pad and they went inside, half surprised that everything still worked just fine even though the Tet was gone, and he expected to find Vika dead. Sykes had his sidearm in his hand and Jack ignored that because how could Vika be alive? Except there she was, in the maintenance bay, in a pod hooked into delta sleep. She'd probably hoped someone would come for her, survivors from the Tet, maybe a rescue mission sent from Titan. She'd probably hoped she'd wake up in a medical bay and maybe Sally would be there and everything would be just fine. She was still wearing the Tet pin on her dress behind the window of the pod.

"Is she alive?" Sykes asked.

Jack nodded. "Yeah," he replied, still kneeling there on the floor beside the pod.

"Are you going to wake her?"

"I think we need to get her away from here before that."

"Is she going to be a problem?"

Jack frowned. "Yeah, probably," he said, though he knew that was pretty much the opposite of the right answer to give, even though he knew there was a chance that Sykes might just leave her there right where she was. He could've lied to save her but Sykes would've just found out anyway. "She's going to need help. We should wake her up back at the base."

Sykes looked at the pod. He went down into a crouch and he peered through the glass and he nodded tightly.

"We'll take her back tomorrow," he said. "We'll stay here tonight and strip out what we can in the morning." Jack really couldn't've said fairer than that.

Sykes had never been anywhere like the house and as they walked around it, Sykes's gun still in his hand, Jack knew that. He gave the jogging wheel in the gym an incredulous quirk of his brows; back in the base, the gym was weights and a couple of mats and a boxing ring they'd scrounged together, a few pairs of gloves and that was that. There was nothing like the kitchen on base, no furniture as new, no views like that. Jack helped himself to a sealed package of food from the kitchen cupboard and poured himself a glass of water and Sykes frowned at him like he'd never seen anything like that, either, a whole glass from a tap, no recyclers in sight. There was an exchanger built into the house instead, pulling in atmospheric water and converting it to potable liquid. 

Jack made dinner. They sat at the dining table after, eating with cutlery that wasn't even slightly bent, food that hadn't been grown in a hydroponics bay underground because it'd probably been genetically engineered somewhere on the Tet. Jack cleaned the dishes after, maybe just because it gave him something to do, and Sykes stared like he'd never seen such a fucking ridiculous waste of water. 

If you think this is bad, go try the shower," Jack said, gesturing to it. "There's plenty of hot water. And it won't cut off after five minutes the way it does on base." 

He didn't expect Sykes to do it. He'd kind of hoped he wasn't sure how much more staring he could take, but he didn't expect him to do it, not really. He expected Sykes to go on mentally cataloguing everything in the house that they could strip out and take with them, calculating how many trips it would take, if the water exchangers could be dismantled because they'd be a crazy asset, how much crap from the workshop would fit into the ship's miniscule cargo bay. What he did was leave the kitchen and go into the bathroom by the med bay. He could hear Sykes pulling off his clothes, his armor, and dropping it on the floor. He could hear the shower start, the spray on the walls, on the floor, and it didn't help. Oh God, it didn't help.

He finished up with the dishes that would probably just wind up left behind anyway and he went through into the bedroom, the bed he'd shared with Vika, Vika 52, whatever he was meant to call her. He sat down but Jesus, he could see into the bathroom, straight in, the goddamn walls all made of glass and that hadn't seemed to matter with Vika because, well, she was Vika, they'd lived together for years, they didn't have those kinds of secrets. He told himself not to look but he did, of course he did. He glanced up and Sykes was naked, of course he was, naked and wet through the the shower spray and his hair was soaked and he raked it back with both hands, pulled it back away from his face. He stretched, all the muscles through his arms and his chest and his abdomen taut and wet and taut and then Sykes looked at him. He clenched his jaw and he looked at him and he ran one hand down the trail of hair that led over his abdomen. He watched him take a deep breath. He watched him wrap his hand around his cock. Then Sykes turned away. He leaned against the tiled wall with his free hand and Jack knew _exactly_ what he was doing. He couldn't really not.

He wanted to join him. Maybe Sykes even wanted that, too. But what the hell was he meant to do, Jack Harper 52, everything he remembered about Julia and Vika and Jake the first lieutenant all mixed up in his head, then everything Sykes remembered about another Jack, Jack 49? Jeez, he didn't even know who he was himself. He didn't even know which Jack Harper it was Sykes wanted.

Jack slept on the couch after that. He let Sykes have the bed. It seemed like the only sensible way forward.

\---

Three minutes after they brought Vika out of delta sleep, the doctor had to sedate her. It was for her own safety as much as theirs; she didn't understand.

Three days after they brought Vika out of delta sleep, she calmed down enough to have a sensible conversation. Jack told her what he knew. She broke the table lamp by her bed and cursed at him. When he put his arms around her, she cried. She might not have liked it, but she was starting to understand.

Three weeks after they brought Vika out of delta sleep, she went to work with the comms team. With what she knew about communications systems, Jack had a feeling it wouldn't be long till ranges were extended tenfold, at least, and he was right, but he kept his distance after she got out of the med bay. She might not have liked how things had ended up, but slowly, _slowly_ , she was starting to accept them; she didn't need him complicating things, though he did wonder how she was doing sometimes, whether she remembered things in her dreams the way he did, if she always had and had just denied it. And as for Jack, things were complicated enough for him as they were without adding Vika to the mix.

It took every day of those three weeks to strip down the tower and get everything the could back to the base; there was really only enough space for two in the ship and sometimes it was Kara that went with him and sometimes it was Sykes and Kara kept glancing at him as they tore out panels and wiring and sectioned down the heating system. 

"You're a pair of bloody idiots, the both of you," she told him near the end of week three, loading up boxes of cutlery and crockery into the cargo bay because apparently Jack had been wrong - the plates weren't just going to find themselves abandoned. "You know he's waiting for you to make the first move, right?"

Jack shoved a box up into the corner of the cargo bay and glanced back at Kara. "I'm pretty sure he's waiting for _Jack Harper_ to make the first move," he replied. "I remember a lot of things from before, Kara. If there's one thing I'm not, it's Jack Harper." 

"So who do you think you are, exactly?" she asked, as they headed back inside. "You think there's a million more Jack Harpers out there? You think it'd matter if there were?" She caught his arm by the door back into the house. "You think we wouldn't know the difference?" 

She put her hands on her hips. "You think _he_ wouldn't know the difference?" She narrowed her eyes. "God, you think he even _liked_ Jack 49? Don't you guys _talk_?"

And hell, maybe she was right. Maybe he'd just always found it a hell of a lot easier to talk about the past than about the future.

It was a couple of days later when Jack ran into Sykes again, stood there scrubbing gun oil from his hands in the shower room, stripped down to the waist. Jack joined him, wondering if he should, wondering if he shouldn't, standing at the next basin over trying to get the engine oil off of his own hands while he tried not to glance in Sykes's direction. He did. Sykes looked back at him. And maybe Sykes wasn't as big out of his armor as he was in it but he was still bigger than Jack, taller, broader, stronger. Jack tried to tell himself he wasn't interested in that, in pressing their hands together to compare their relative size, in the breadth of Sykes's shoulders, the muscles in his back. He tried to tell himself he hadn't been thinking about Sykes that way for months, but he knew he had. 

"I dreamed I was on the Tet," Jack said, conversationally, scrubbing oil from under his nails. "There were thousands of clones suspended all around the place in pods, like maybe they were waiting for something." He glanced at Sykes, maybe just to check he was listening; maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. "A voice woke me up and I had no memory at all. There was another guy who looked like me. We were in some kind of a dorm room, just the two of us. They taught us things. About the drones and the ships and the war, y'know? And what we'd been made for. I think they wiped that part out after that, before we were deployed." He gripped the edge of the sink. "Do you think that was Tech 49?"

Sykes glanced at him just for a second, then looked back down at his hands and continued scrubbing. "Yeah, maybe," he said. 

"I dreamed we tried to figure out if we were exactly the same."

Sykes looked up again, and this time he didn't look away. 

"Were you?" he asked.

"Yeah, we were." Jack pulled off his shirt and tossed it onto the bench. "We both had this mole," he said, pointing out the place on his back as Sykes watched him. He tugged down the waist of his pants a couple of inches and rubbed at the birthmark on his hip. "We both had this." Sykes's face flushed faintly red as he watched and his hands went still over the basin, squeezing the heck out of the oily cloth he was holding. And Jack untied his laces, toed off his boots, stripped himself out of his pants completely because hell, he'd been planning to take his rationed shower anyway. 

"He didn't have this," he said, fingers rubbing his thigh by a faint white scar from a cut he hadn't let Vika treat. "But I guess I didn't back then, either." He pulled off his socks, then tucked his thumbs into his underwear and pulled that off, too, while Sykes watched him. "He looked just like me. He reacted just like I did. We had a lot of time to work it out." He rubbed his own abdomen with one hand, getting engine oil across it but that didn't seem to matter all that much. "But we're not the same, Sykes. I'm not him. Were you attracted to him, too?"

Sykes snorted, amused, and raked his wet, oily hands through his loose hair. 

"No," he said. "He was here and gone in a couple of days. And it's not like I ever saw him naked." 

Jack grinned. Sykes shook his head, like he was trying to hide his smile but maybe not. And when Sykes strode across the room and put his hands on him, when Sykes put his mouth on him, when they kissed, Jack's fingers tangled up in Sykes's hair, neither of them could've cared less about the gun oil, the engine oil, whether Tech 52 was the same as Tech 49. It really didn't seem to matter all that much; in the end, Jack figured it never had.

They had sex for the first time three days later, in Sykes's room after he'd gotten back in from one of his team's scavenging trips. They undressed each other, sand all over Sykes's clothes, in his hair, his face burned just lightly from the sun. Jack had just managed to get the oil off of his hands. 

"Do it," Jack said, . "Just do it." So Sykes pushed into him. Sykes pushed in until his chest was pressed right up to Jack's back and he wrapped his arms around his waist and held him there till his breath steadied. Then one of Sykes's hands moved down, skimmed Jack's abdomen, made its way down the trail of coarse hair to rub there by the base of his cock. Sykes groaned; he moved; Jack braced himself against the headboard and he pushed back hard against him because hell if he could wait and jeez, Sykes's hands on him, strong, bruised just like they always were and almost trembling, were fucking electric. And judging by how quick it was over, how hot and hard and tight and breathless, Jack guessed it'd been as long for Sykes as it had for him, maybe longer. He stayed the night after that, though the bed wasn't really meant for two and they did it again in the morning before breakfast; they made it last a whole lot longer. 

And, the more time passed, the more Jack remembered.

\---

They left the bunker a year ago now, because damn the maintenance crap was getting harder every day and there was no holding onto it forever, no holding onto the base forever, not down there in the sand where water was scarce. They scouted with the ship with Vika on comms but somehow it wasn't even like before at all. They moved on in the jeeps, and found the lake four months later - there's a whole village in the valley now, houses they've put together, food they grow. Jack and Julia are on pretty good terms, but she's still a scientist and he's still a serviceman. They reminisce sometimes but mostly, he leaves her to her memories. He's Jack Harper, but that doesn't mean he's the same man as the other two Jacks she knew. 

Jack remembers his life before the mission, how driven he was, how NASA had always been his goal right from the day his dad bought him his first toy rocket. He remembers his dad was in the Air Force, his dad was a pilot, the seat-of-the-pants kind of test pilot that never seems to pay attention to the safety regs, but somehow he lived past retirement and lived to see his son go into space. Jack guesses his dad outlived him. Jack guesses his dad lived to see thousands of him pouring off of ships into the streets because he's seen the footage of it, shaky phone cams showing a whole damn army of guys who looked just like him because they _were_ him. He wishes he could say that's the weirdest revelation that he's had lately. 

He remembers how even after he met Julia, his work had been what counted, and how he beat himself up for that, all the missed dates and forgotten birthdays and the Valentine's he spent in the flight simulator with Vika that, in hindsight, might've given her the wrong idea. He remembers how Julia always said she understood and how she smiled when she said it like maybe she did understand. But she was always a scientist first and an astronaut second and she's the same even now, using what she knows to help people but mostly because it's a challenge, not because she feels like it's her place, not because of duty, the way he knows it is for him. 

He was USAF for twenty-two years. He flew combat missions for more than half of them, then got himself accepted to NASA, and even then he'd've gone right back in a heartbeat if they'd said they needed him, if that was what his orders were. Julia was a scientist and he was a serviceman. He guesses that's pretty much what they still are. 

These days, he shares a cabin he made with Sykes and he fixes generators and he tinkers with engines and he keeps the water purifiers up and running while Sykes goes out with his team for clothes and parts and old canned food it turns out is somehow still good, even after a war. Sykes brings back books sometimes. He brought Jack back a baseball once, a glove another, records Julia lets him play on the player her Jack left her. He brings back things that remind him of the time he's from and Jack tells him about it, on their crappy old couch after dark at night. 

Jack tells him about NASA, about space, about how the Tet pulled the ship in and changed everything for him. He tells him about quiet times after he woke up, about how Tech 49's hands were the same as his, his fingerprints, the lines in his face, the veins in his wrists. He tells him all the things they did, exploring the Tet, peering up at all those rows of the other clones that hadn't woken yet, how they pushed two beds together in the dorm and how weird it felt, identical mouths on each other's skin, identical hands and identical cocks, how screwing Tech 49 was nothing like screwing himself except it was, it really was. Jeez, it was different with Sykes. _He_ was different with Sykes.

These days, Sykes comes back to the cabin and Jack comes back to the cabin and they talk or they don't or they go to bed and Sykes's hands are bigger than his, Sykes weighs more than he does and he's taller and he's stronger and there are marks on him that are nowhere on Jack, and vice versa. They do their job and they come back to the cabin and they fuck or they talk or do both and Jack knows it's not what he remembers that really makes a difference. 

His past's not important. What's important is the memories he's making now.


End file.
